| Hateland -
Articles |
01/07/00 - The happy, loveable
lad who grew up a hate-filled loner
By Sue Clough and John Steele
The Telegraph
DAVID COPELAND wanted to be famous in some way.
He told police: "If no one remembers you, you never
existed."
He will be remembered now - by maimed victims and by
relatives of three people killed when his firework bomb
sprayed 500 nails at 400mph through the crowded Admiral
Duncan pub in Soho. The jury had to decide whether he
was a nondescript but fundamentally rational loner who
lived out his adolescent fascination with Nazism in
a calculating attempt to bomb himself into the history
books; or a mental inadequate whose developing insanity
drove him to kill.
During the late Nineties, Copeland lived alone in a
series of bedsits, in London and then in Hampshire.
Life was a gloomy routine of work alongside his father
on the Jubilee Line extension in East London and, latterly,
hours spent brooding in his room, bedecked with Nazi
flags and paraphernalia, with his pet rat Whizzer his
only companion.
He earned enough money to indulge his appetite for
West End prostitutes and also to spend £1,500
over four months on fireworks, from which he removed
the flash powder, and other bomb components. Friendless
and festering with hatred, Copeland consulted the internet
for details of bomb construction. He began experimenting,
secretly igniting small explosive devices in various
bedsits. He later exploded larger ones under cover of
darkness on a common near Cove.
Copeland began life as the second of three sons born
to Steven and Caroline Copeland, a working class couple
who went to live in Yately, Hants. He was, in the words
of his father, a pretty little boy with "such a
cute manner - he was generally loveable". Mr Copeland,
a mechanical engineer, added: "He did very well
at school. He was fairly intelligent. He was just a
normal boy, into football and mini-rugby. He was not
moody or withdrawn."
Mrs Copeland left her husband when David was 19. She
has made it clear in talking to Copeland's lawyers and
psychiatrists that, when she left, she saw nothing of
what was to come in her son. He was, she felt, "a
happy lad" who played with the children at family
gatherings. Classmates remember Copeland, if at all,
as unremarkable. None recalls him showing interest in
Nazism or white dominance, despite his claims to police
that he was already an admirer of Hitler.
He studied an electrical course at a local college
but gained no further qualifications. Then, at some
point, he began drinking heavily and taking drugs, collecting
on the way minor convictions for common assault and
criminal damage. He claimed he was "mentally tortured"
by parents who considered him to be homosexual - attributing
his hatred of homosexuals to this. His father said:
"But David had girlie magazines and girlfriends.
I never had any problems or worries about his sexuality."
Copeland also thought he was sexually inadequate after
a late puberty and a visit to a growth clinic where
his genitals were examined. He blamed his parents for
this humiliation. Whatever the cause, at some point
in his late teens he began to withdraw into a world
of murderous, Nazi-influenced fantasies. Psychiatrists
have found him to have a higher than average IQ but
to be an under-achiever with a powerful sense of inadequacy.
His mind became fertile territory for thoughts of violence
and terror.
Mr Copeland was aware his son had visited a doctor after
"panic attacks" and added: "He rattled
on at times about religious stuff, not about racism or
homophobia but Bible references. I'd say, 'What are you
talking about David? Shut up'." |
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